


Rocket Man (or, How Tony Stark Got His Groove Back)

by feyrelay



Series: DIEU (Daddy Issues Extended Universe) [7]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aged-Up Peter Parker, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coma, Crack Treated Seriously, Emotional Roller Coaster, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Major Illness, Married Couple, Mentions of Cancer, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-18 23:26:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17590415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feyrelay/pseuds/feyrelay
Summary: Inspired by It's A Wonderful Life, if that movie took a wrong turn and drove off a cliff to land smack-dab in the middle of Crackville, feat. Loki.(A re-post of one of my Yule prompt fills; I've decided to host them separately to make them more accessible.)





	1. Turning Point

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tangodoodles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangodoodles/gifts), [SbiderSlut (BlackCoffeeCat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCoffeeCat/gifts).



> Content: warning for angst, illness, 'death', and brushes with suicidal ideation; you'll see what I mean
> 
> This series has its own playlist, listen here: https://open.spotify.com/user/1urx036e5iqb0ioukr2bj8yih/playlist/0Ut26l5n0fVlqf2CtjLZzq?si=tx798aHORkqNVCgGiD_1IQ

Peter is twenty-nine and whining about it.

Tony gets it, okay? When he was twenty-nine, he was drunk and/or high all the time and whenever anyone tried to probe the reasons for his anxiety and constant identity crises he had just mumbled something about Y2K (eye roll) and taken another bump. Christ, Peter hadn’t even been born yet, and hoo boy, what a thought.

The point is, no one wants to turn thirty. But, Tony needs Peter to try and take it down a notch because, as Tony tells him despite not quite believing it himself, thirty is the new twenty.

(“Yeah, maybe  _for_   _trees_ …” Peter mutters.)

And, okay, fine. Peter’s feelings are valid or whatever, but does Tony’s husband not realize that if Peter is almost thirty then Tony is officially  _sixty_? Have some empathy, sweetheart, he has begged Peter, repeatedly. If no one wants to be thirty, then for sure no one wants to be sixty.

Peter has sighed guiltily each and every time he’s brought this up, subsided, and then proceeded to suck Tony’s brain out through his cock, in apology, but the subject still weighs on them both.

It doesn’t help that Peter has all these things he still wants to do before thirty and he’s pushing himself too hard. He wants to tell people he’s Spider-Man and start scouting a successor to whom he can teach the tools of the trade, but he’s lived with the secret identity so long that he doesn’t know how to let go. Tony’s heart aches for him, even though he doesn’t understand, not really. Way back when, he couldn’t wait to tell everyone he was Iron Man.

Peter has also said that he feels, well, a bit broken and a bit defective because he doesn’t know how to drive yet. The year he was meant to be learning, at sixteen, he’d been a bit busy being dead and then he’d had bigger hang-ups to deal with after he got back. It had been too easy to just not learn over the years, living in the city and being chauffeured around by Tony’s fleet or swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper.

Tony’s doing his best, here, trying to be a sensitive and loving husband and even offering to teach Peter how to drive. But, fuck, it’s almost Christmas and the holidays always make Tony depressed. Morgan and Maria get bigger and more devious every year which means he and Pepper and May have to work even more closely to three-way co-parent and it takes its toll, especially with May being sick from the chemo all the time. And those are just his actual kids… that’s not even touching on the stress he gets secondhand from Harley, who has quit his job at Bethesda Studios to start a non-profit advocacy group focused on keeping the dangers of gambling out of kids’ games and taking a stand against loot boxes and microtransactions.

Suffice it to say, Tony is feeling worn down.

Then, MJ gets back to them with the lab results. Her guerilla-style, no-holds-barred medical testing has uncovered what May’s doctors could not; The tissue sample from May’s breast lump has the same resonant radioactivity as the geological samples brought back from Titan.

And so he spirals.

His fault, his fault, his fault.

Tony should never have been in that Humvee; he should have been with Rhodey. He should never have recruited a fourteen-year-old Peter to fight a war between two old men. He should have been alone on a foreign planet, not dragging a kid into his nightmare.

And even then: He should have just taken his lumps from May when he returned to Earth alone; he shouldn’t have done what he always does and given her a gift to try and fruitlessly buy her forgiveness. It had been a little crystal bottle of ash and dirt from Titan, a necklace that she wore day and night, for years and years, even after Peter returned. It had soothed her anxiety, Tony guesses, nestling as it frequently did against her breast. She’d stopped wearing it after Pepper had had the twins, knowing that they’d soon be trying to cut their teeth on anything dangling from either of their mothers’ necks.

Tony wonders what he would have done if she’d kept wearing it, if it had turned out that he’d given his then-infant daughters cancer, too.

And now he’s what? He’s sweeping past sixty years of age with each passing day, rapidly approaching over-the-hill, and trapping his amazing, gorgeous, brilliant, strong, youthful husband in a marriage that can only end in being widowed. Peter won’t even have his aunt there to help him through his grief, most likely, not if the doctors are to be believed.

Morgan and Maria will be down from three parents and a Peter that dotes on them to just Pepper and Peter, leaving them with one full-on parent and one erstwhile cousin-turned-step-parent-turned-grieving mess. Now that he thinks about it, Pepper will have to grieve both Tony and May, and damn. Peter will probably have to put on that brave face to make sure the girls don’t end up completely helter-skelter.

His fault, his fault, his fault.

 _It would have been better if I’d never existed at all,_ he thinks, draining his… fifth? ninth? glass of scotch.

\---

The next day, Peter is prepared to wake his husband from an alcohol-induced slumber. The news hit them both hard, but Peter knows they need to talk about the frankly impractical level of guilt Tony is forcing down his own throat, along with corresponding amounts of alcohol.

 _No one could have known about the risks of long-term exposure to particles from Titan_ , he tells himself.

He maps out what he wants to say in his head, the approach he wants to take when it comes to Tony’s drinking and later, when they talk about their next move as a family, regarding the twins. Peter psychs himself up and then pushes open the door to Tony’s study, quietly walks over to his husband’s slumped form, and tilts the man’s body back in the chair so Peter can rub his knuckles along Tony’s sternum. It’s the way Tony always wakes Peter up, when Peter’s been hurting, always has been.

Tony doesn’t wake, though he’s clearly breathing. Peter rubs harder, and calls the man’s name.

Nothing.

\---

When Tony wakes, he’s on the roof of the building that he’d had remodeled to build his and Peter’s Manhattan penthouse. It’s covered in birdshit and Loki and Wanda have somehow invented a way to play what looks like solitaire,  _against_ each other. It’s fucking freezing and he spits at them where they’re sitting, cross-legged and unconcerned, a few feet away.

“What the fuck?”

Wanda looks up, and smirks. Loki explains, “We didn’t want to move you, but if we’d left you at the exact point in space where your body fell asleep, you’d be sticking half in and half out of the floor. When you remodeled, you sunk the floors the make the ceilings higher, remember? So we thought you should probably be moved, at least along the z-axis.”

Wanda mimes with her hands, “Drag and drop. Like the Sims.”

Loki swipes his hands together, as if he’s dusting them off, “Mischief managed.”

“What the fuck?” Tony says again, though this time his voice is thin with panic.

“Allow me to make this simple for you, you whimpering, anxiety-ridden, pot-metal has-been…” Loki starts.

“What he means is, we heard you were thinking of how much better things would be if you’d never been born,” Wanda explains, “…so we made that happen. Try it on for size.”

Tony chokes down the panic and tries to rally behind humor, as he frequently does, “Listen, Team Rocket, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull… Wanda, I thought we were good, after all these years?”

Loki looks on as Scarlet Witch grimaces. “We are, but you asked for it, and… well. Loki will be your guide, I’ve got a rendezvous to get to.”

“With who?” Tony asks, incredulous.

Wanda pins him with her gaze, eyes flashing red for a split second. “With Pietro.”

Ah, right.

His fault, his fault, his fault.

\---

Pepper catches Peter at the hospital; he’d thrown on his suit and webbed himself and Tony’s limp form to the hospital, thinking it’d be faster that way. He’d forgotten that Pepper and May would already be there, though in a different ward, confirming MJ’s findings.

By the time the two women are done with their consult, Tony’s been set up in a bed, monitoring devices all around him. They may or may not have him moved to the Avengers’ private medical facility, if he doesn’t wake up within 48 hours.

Peter relays all this information to Pepper and May, voice wooden. Tony is in a coma, and all he can do is play a sick game of telephone. There’s no one to fight, no one to fetch, nothing to  _do_  except wait.

He leaves Tony with the two women, temporarily, to change out of his suit and mask and into his street clothes. When Peter comes back, he nearly walks in on Pepper, bent down, gently pressing a kiss to the shirt above May’s breast, as if healing a minor boo-boo. May’s hands smooth over the older woman’s strawberry blonde hair, which is shot through with grey that masquerades as platinum blonde, these days.

He holds back his feelings as he enters the room, more noisily than usual to give them time to hear him coming. The muscles in Peter’s jaw clench even as he tells them to go home, talk over the advice the doctors gave them, and he’ll even pick up the girls from school later if May and Pepper would like.

 _Is this his life, now?_  Peter thinks desperately, as he watches his aunt and Pepper take their leave after spouting their thanks. He draws May back in for a gentle hug before they go.

 _How could it get any worse?_  he sighs internally.

\---

Inside his coma world, Tony has the answer to Peter’s question.

Peter could be dead…  _is_  dead, in this reality.

In the absence of Tony Stark, Justin Hammer holds an Expo because the state of New York is still desperate to make Queens seem hip and cutting edge, and little Peter Parker still goes because American-made science is science, no matter how shitty. The Expo still gets hijacked, for the very same reason, and Peter still confronts a dangerous weapon because he never needed Tony Stark to be a hero anyway.

It’s just, this time, no one pulls him out of harm’s way.

The pamphlets Peter had been clutching to his small chest flutter to the floor and soak through, turning red as Zuzu’s rose petals.


	2. Secondhand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content: warning for angst, mentions of death, illness, suicide, drugs, angst, Infinity War spoilers, basically anything sad, it's here

Tony does not, in fact, wake from his coma after 48 hours, so he is painstakingly moved upstate to the Avengers’ medical facility. Peter keeps vigil nearly day and night. Dr. Cho is in residence as well as Dr. Banner and they trade back and forth between running tests on Tony and theorizing about a potential ground-breaking cure for the alien cancer infecting May’s breast. Now that they know what caused it, it’s clear chemo was never going to work, and May rages at all the lost days and all the needless vomiting. Pepper tells her to forget it, but Peter can see in May’s eyes that she’s adding in her mind, doing a mean sort of arithmetic to calculate the cost of their pointless efforts.

Nobody has much time to spare for the girls, and they go to stay with the Bartons and Natasha for the holidays. It’s the kindest thing, really, but it still breaks Peter’s heart to watch them go, waving from the back seat, all the way down the long drive out of the compound.

May and Pepper will join the girls for the holiday itself, but until then, they’re ready to fight this.

Peter is a celebrity now in his own right by virtue of both his inventions and being Tony Stark’s young, attractive husband, and he puts himself in charge of their media strategy so Pepper can focus on May. He manages to keep the severity of Tony’s condition from the media for a few weeks, but Karen Page breaks the story days before Christmas. Peter can hardly blame her for scooping up the lead she’d gotten from one of the nursing administrators at the hospital where Tony had been under care for the first two days… in the years since she and Frank Castle settled down together, her credibility had taken a hit and she was always trying to make a comeback.

After he’s done reading the article, which he does out loud because the doctor said it could help, Peter allows himself a moment of weakness and cries into his husband’s neck.

Tony doesn’t move a muscle.

\---

It’s raining, suddenly.

The drops sluice down Tony’s collar as Loki struts behind him, an annoying presence perpetually over Tony’s shoulder as he wanders around this universe in which he does not exist.

For the first time in his life, no one knows who he is. It’s a wonderful life, or at least it is until Tony realizes that he also has no money and his name buys nothing with people who don’t know it.

He doesn’t know why he’s been drawn to Hell’s Kitchen today, but he follows his instincts. He ends up breaking into an apartment whose windows are uncomfortably close to a bunch of flashing billboards; he figures whomever lives here is a masochist anyway, and Tony desperately needs shelter from the strangely warm, salty rain.

The apartment turns out to be empty, stacks of mail sorted into odd little piles on the table, and Tony collapses on the sofa, exhausted.

So far, he’s been presented with the fact that if he’d never been born, his parents would have died of old age. Apparently, his father had only been so utterly beholden to S.H.I.E.L.D. and their pet projects because he’d owed so many favors to so many people trying to keep Tony out of trouble and trying to keep making more money to fund Tony’s brilliance, his mistakes, and his expensive tastes.

Yeah, that one had smarted a bit. In this universe, Howard Stark retired at a sensible age and never developed what would become the Winter Soldier serum. Good for him.

On the other hand, Peter Parker went to be with his parents before he reached his tenth birthday. Ben Parker, who’d been little Peter’s escort to the Hammer Expo and the one who’d lost hold of the child’s hand in the pandemonium, had put a bullet in his own brain shortly thereafter. May Parker, in her titanic grief, had jumped from Xanax to Percocet to fentanyl to heroin over the next five years until one day she just didn’t wake up from her high at all.

Tony was starting to think he wanted to exist after all, but then again, at least these versions of his nearest and dearest had had their suffering cut short. Surely acute pain and relatively quick deaths were better than the long-term suffering he’d caused in his original timeline?

\---

Peter tries to stay off the internet, but that’s never been his strong suit. And, he’s by Tony’s side all day, and he forgot his book today, so.

The sheer number of people who find themselves up in arms at the thought of Iron Man being no more doesn’t surprise him. He’s always thought of Tony as a hero, as the world’s best defender, and he fully expected for things like #TonyStark5Ever and #ComeBackIronMan to be trending. Wendy’s social media team jumps on the story to promote their hastily cobbled-together, new menu item, a strawberry-banana frosty in red and yellow-gold, with 10% of the sales proceeds going to a coma research foundation. Burger King dyes their buns black in mourning and Peter wants to tell them that that is both premature and disgusting.

What Peter hadn’t prepared himself for are the more personal stories. He gets letters at the compound from kids (and their parents) who are interested in engineering, now that their school has better STEM funding through The September Foundation. MIT sends him a very fancy letter from the dean, something unbearably officious, but the dean’s assistant slipped a little note into the envelope as well. The post-it, diminutive next to the dean’s engraved missive, tells a short story about how kind to her Tony had been on his last visit, and how he’d told her the photo on her desk, of her toddler, was adorable.

A young woman called RiRi sends him a coded message through Natasha, saying she was sure Mr. Stark would wake up soon.

A young gay couple posts a vlog to YouTube about how Tony’s marriage to Peter had made them feel comfortable enough for them to come out at work, employed as they are in the technology and engineering space at the newly re-branded Pym Technologies which hadn’t, until Tony outed himself, been the most welcoming of fields.

And finally, Peter laughs until he cries at a letter which he reads out loud. It’s from a young adult named Alex with a bionic arm that Tony had delivered under the alias ‘Robert’… as if the kid wouldn’t grow up and realize it had actually been Tony Stark who’d complimented him on his bow-tie.

\---

When a nosy strawberry blonde almost shoots him coming into the apartment he’d broken into, Tony moves on.

He heads toward the children’s ward at a hospital nearby, and he can’t think of why that should be so until he realizes he can sleep on one of the benches there and hospital staff will just assume he’s a beleaguered parent of a sick child. Luckily, he’d fallen asleep in nice clothes the night that Loki and Wanda had sent him here, so he doesn’t yet look as homeless as he actually is.

Loki, smug, keeps charming the pants off men and women alike, keeping them fed at least. However, the more he learns about what life is like with no name and no money, the more he hates it. And, he learns more about what a world sans Tony Stark looks like.

The Avengers weren’t a thing without him, so Ultron never happened, but Pietro and Wanda had still been orphans (until this world’s version of her was dusted) because the military-industrial complex demanded that it be so. Without Tony, it only meant that someone else had taken his place as Merchant of Death.

Rhodey could walk without assistance, so there was that, but he’d long since been retired due to his age.

Pepper was a solo art dealer, barely scraping by since young hipsters didn’t want to buy art from a sixty-year-old, and Maria and Morgan didn’t exist at all. Harley Keener was an assistant manager at a grocery store in his hometown, and Tony was pretty sure he had a meth problem.

Loki takes him whenever and wherever he wants to go in time and space, and that includes the middle of the ocean, when he finds out what Cap’s been up to.

Steve had locked himself inside a giant safe and slammed himself against the inside to tip said safe overboard into the ocean, because without Tony, Thanos’s victory had been decisive and permanent. Bucky Barnes was dust and dust he would remain, and without the Avengers being the draw that they were in another timeline, S.H.I.E.L.D. showed Steve some mercy and let him drown himself. They let him keep drowning himself, over and over, as the serum repeatedly (infinitely) healed his burst lungs and repaired the heart and brain damage from lack of oxygen.

Loki lets Tony sleep for a while, after that.

\---

That night, Peter goes out in the Iron Man suit. It fits about as well as you’d expect secondhand armor to, but it’s good enough, and he wears the spider-suit underneath so that if something goes wrong, he has a backup. It’s Christmas Eve, so as soon as FRIDAY greets him (“Hello, boss!”) and shows him the heads-up display, he’s off. He flies around Albany and makes sure that people get plenty of photos, and then he rockets over into NYC, miles and miles of interstate eaten up quicker than he would’ve thought.

Peter stops a few muggings, and some gay-bashing outside a club. He kicks a dealer off his corner, but lets a prostitute stay after she makes it clear she enjoys sex-work and no, she doesn’t need his help.

He makes sure to zip by the Staten Island Ferry and the WTC memorial and Rockefeller Plaza and the Statue of Liberty, just to make sure he gets on Twitter.

When he gets back to the compound, Peter is exhilarated and hopeful and he’s sweating with both fear and excitement.

And, yes, he had hoped that maybe somehow Tony would have woken up, but it’s okay, he guesses, because he tells Tony all about it anyway.

\---

It’s Christmas Eve and Tony feels the need to be a tourist in his own damn city. He drags himself to all the big spots, and because Loki is still doing his Jacob Marley impersonation and following Tony everywhere, he even makes them both climb all the stairs in the Statue of Liberty.

It’s surprisingly warm on the observation deck, considering how high up they are and that it’s New York in December. Tony says as much.

“Well, without all the arc reactor technology and applications you and Parker would have designed over the years, what Midgardians call ‘climate change’ has worsened,” Loki shrugs, as if it makes no difference to him. Tony guesses that it probably doesn’t.

They were able to sneak past security on the way up, but aren’t so lucky on the way back down. He and Loki end up pressed into an alcove as two security guys argue over whether it’s a good thing or not that Captain America has vanished.

One guy has a surprisingly nuanced view, and Tony listens as his brusque voice opines, “What we really need is a superhero that’s 100% human, underneath it all. No powers or serums, but just a smart dude who is willing to go out there in some kick-ass armor and get banged up so we don’t have to. Let someone else be the thin blue line for once.”

Tony swallows heavily as he steps out from the alcove. “Happy, is that you?”

“It’s  _Harry or Harold_ , and no, actually it’s  _Officer Hogan_  to you,” Happy says, amending himself as he eyes Loki coming out of the alcove too, and Tony can only imagine what it looks like they were doing.

“Sorry, I just-” Tony says, voice a little bit gruff with emotion.

“Forget it, bub, you two know you’re not supposed to be here this time of night,” the other guard says.

“It’s just, you saved my life once, and now I’m here, having thrown it all away… and you deserve so much better than to be working this shift on Christmas Eve,” Tony explains wetly, ignoring everyone except this alternate version of his old friend.

Happy sighs and begins shuffling them down the remaining stairs, but Tony grabs onto Loki’s hands, not caring what this, what this, this  _doppelganger_  must assume about their relationship… he’s ready to beg.

“Take me back. Take me back to the normal world. I wanna live, please.”

Loki’s smirk, which has been growing since they happened upon the security guards, gets even wider before he responds.

“No.”


	3. Evergreen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content: Warning for angst and references to canonical character deaths

The year that Peter is fifteen, just a few months after he’d saved Mr. Stark’s property from the Vulture, Peter and Ned and May make the drive up to the Avengers’ compound in Ned’s parents’ beater to see the public tree-lighting. Tony is atop a huge ladder, looking out over the crowd, and even though there are obviously some Avengers missing it’s still a special moment when all the lights go on and illuminate the themed ornaments. The bottom of the tree is littered with gifts reserved for indigent families that had signed up for The September Foundation’s Christmas list; there are toys and games and school supplies for the kids, but also things like clothes and blankets and gift cards for groceries and gas.

Tony gives a speech, and his eyes meet Peter’s once or twice, and that’s the best gift of all. There are some other events scattered around the public parts of the compound’s campus, but Peter and Ned break away from May, who gets roped into several conversations with apparently eligible bachelors. Ned is the best wingman ever, because he doesn’t complain as Peter follows Mr. Stark around the event, their duo always a safe distance away, watching the man light up the night all on his own.

\--

The next Christmas, Peter is dead.

He shows up to be there anyway (for certain values of ‘being there’); it was a magical, musical tree.

\--

When Peter is seventeen, Tony comes to his place instead. And, okay, he knows it’s really to see Pepper and May’s new apartment; he’s not stupid. But he bullies Tony into opening his gift early, and the way Tony looks at him when he unwraps one of those picture-frame ornaments makes his stomach flip. Peter had had it custom-made so the plural possessive would be right, and it says “Babies’ First Christmas” just the way it should, for twins.

He digs the old Polaroid instant camera he borrowed from MJ out of his bag and gets a shot of Pepper’s belly with both May’s and Tony’s hands on it. Tony’s hand is tremoring, so Peter crops the picture with scissors to fit the ornament, but then hands it back over for the man to add it to the tree himself.

\--

When Peter is eighteen, their relationship is still frightfully new at the start of December. Tony is knee-deep in arrangements for the Avengers’ public tree and the holidays always make him melancholy anyway, Peter’s been told. He reminds himself that Howard and Maria Stark only made it halfway through their last December and Peter wonders if Tony had let a member of the household staff take down all of the decorations, or if he’d insisted on doing it himself. He goes looking in the deep storage, where FRIDAY tells him the Stark family stuff is, and finds a box that is literally all shards of glass ornaments. On top of the glittering pieces, there’s a folded piece of paper marked in savage, block-y writing ‘NOTE TO SELF’.

It reads: DON’T TOUCH PRECIOUS THINGS WHEN DRUNK, DUMBASS and there’s one bloody thumbprint in each of the bottom corners and several matching fingerprints on the back, gone brown with age.

\--

When he has nineteen to his name and they have over a year to theirs, Peter feels secure enough to bring up the box. Tony says, “You’re my family now… and anyway, it was a long time ago; there’s nothing to be done.”

\--

But there  _is_  something to be done. Peter, at twenty years of age and with Tony’s freely-given funds burning a hole in his… well his  _phone_ , okay, it’s in his  _account_ , who carries cash?... but, with Tony’s money burning a hole in his proverbial pocket, he does some digging. There are several antiques restoration places in the city, and Peter finally finds one with someone on staff who specializes in decorative glasswork. He brings in the box and shows the elderly woman the multitude of mixed-together shards and she looks at him as if he’s insane.

He explains, “I’m in love.”

She nods, understanding but still skeptical.

“Er… I have photos?”

And he does. He’s spent the better part of the past year finding photos of various Stark Christmases of yesteryear and cross-referencing the visible ornaments with department store catalogues and deadstock. Peter estimates there are the broken components of at least a hundred ornaments in the box, and for some reason he knows like he knows his own  _name_  that even twenty-one-year-old Tony wouldn’t have missed a single bit of glass when he’d cleaned up, not when it had been  _this_  glass. (Plus, Peter’s poked around, and several of the bits in the box still have blood on them.)

\--

Over the next year, he and Mrs. Dombrowski work to get all of the ornaments put back together. Some of the shards were pulverized into dust or basically disintegrated over the years, so what they do is create cages that mimic the shapes of the ornaments and do a sophisticated sort of papier-mâché that they can stick the shards to. It creates a sort of stained-glass effect and makes the vintage-restored ornaments much more durable for the future, especially with the girls running around. They tie each one with a golden bow-and-loop, instead of hooks that can prick little fingers.

Peter also collects a lot of vintage deadstock of whole, undamaged glass ornaments that match this set and ties those with a red ribbon instead. They’ll look great next to the collection of family ornaments Peter and Pepper and May and Tony and the twins have built up.

He shows Tony the whole collection on the 31st anniversary of Howard and Maria’s deaths, the year Peter is twenty-one.

\--

By the next Christmas, they’re already married. They vowed that their faithfulness will be evergreen.

\--

The year before Peter turns thirty, Tony is in a coma, but that’s a different story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That year that Peter was dusted?
> 
> I wrote that shit, and it's angsty AF.
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/17101982


	4. Wheel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been completely reworked and redone to a) be better and b) incorporate new elements. If you read it on the Yule prompt meme, you should take a 2nd look, for sure.

As Loki and Tony wait out the night in the drunk tank (“for your own safety, you loons,” Happy says), Loki explains the situation.

It’s like this:

They’re not actually  _in_  another timeline, of course they’re not. Only Carol and occasionally Scott and Hope can time travel and/or universe hop. Loki has some tricks up his sleeve, but he’s not a literal god, he’s just an alien from a extra-dimensional race; it’s different.

They’re in Tony’s mind.

He’s doing this to himself and he thought this shit up, and ain’t that a kick in the teeth? His arrogance truly knows no bounds, he’s decided. Explains some things, though.

Apparently, Wanda got them all here by amplifying her powers through Vision’s Mind Stone, a purpose for which it was not designed, or maybe that’s not the right word, ‘designed’.

It’s not the purpose for which the Mind Stone was…  _destined_. Vision only agreed because he calculated it was an effective means to therapize Tony into not giving himself liver failure.

And, the thing is, when Infinity Stones are used for purposes other than those for which they are destined, they extract a terrible price. Ask Loki, he knows. Gamora, too.

As Tony digests this, he uses the fact that this is his dream and he’s infinitely familiar with the designs of drunk tanks to get them the hell out of here.

He regrets it as soon as they’re outside, because it’s still night and it’s still chilly; at least the drunk tank had been warm.

Okay, fine. He’s Tony fucking Stark and this is  _his_  Wheel of Fortune they’re riding like a bucking bronco; he can build anything. They warp to Central Park and find a nice open space and Tony occupies himself by creating, from memory, a replica of his and Peter’s penthouse. It’s just, uh. Now it’s on the ‘ground floor’, so to speak, so that’s the main difference.

And, there’s no Peter inside.

Loki comes into the ‘penthouse’ and actually seems impressed, for once, at his skills. He says, “For a Midgardian, your mind is quite potent.”

“Gee, thanks. You might want to check the back of your hand for an imprint of my face.”

“What?”

“Forget it,” Tony relents, and he collapses in front of the fireplace. “Why, if this is my dream or what have you, has everything seemed so…”

“Real?” Loki tries.

“Yes, that. Exactly.”

“Well, when humans have actual, real dreams, they seem to be real whilst inside them, do they not?” Loki inquires, but Tony knows it’s rhetorical. (As if Loki’s ever passed up the chance to set foot in the nightmare realm and make things worse.)

The Asgardian continues, adding, “Besides, you seem to have taken in quite a lot of detail about the city over the years, and your formidable IQ makes filling in the blanks logically quite a simple task; I also believe you are receiving some… shall we say ‘extra information’… from Mr. Parker in the real world. He doesn’t seem like the type to leave your side for long…or to keep quiet while he holds vigil.”

Tony perks up. “He may be the only person who knows this city more intimately than I do. And, yeah, I wouldn’t call him… close-mouthed. Ever.”

“Precisely.”

Tony wilts again. “I can’t believe I’m never going to see him again. This is all my-”

“Of course, you’ll see your lover again, you sniveling, aging, gormless-”

“Wait, what?” Tony balks. “I thought you said, and I quote, ‘The Mind Stone therefore extracts a terrible price’, so we’re stuck here…”

Loki pinches the bridge of his nose. “I did say ‘terrible’… a word which here means great, titanic, worthy of awe, et cetera. Not whatever pop culture usage you’re envisioning.”

Tony leans forward. “So, what kind of Shakespearean reckoning are we in for then, to get out of here, Claudius?”

The God of Mischief meets Tony Stark’s eyes, taking the man in, and does not, necessarily, find him lacking.

“You, Mr. Stark, have to admit that you’re wrong,” Loki asserts, ignoring Tony’s jab.

“Easy enough, Antigone,” he tries again, desperate to distract from his growing sense of foreboding, and adds, “…I can’t remember the last time I was actually right.”

\---

It’s Christmas, and Peter doesn’t know what to do. Their tree at home isn’t decorated and the girls and May and Pepper are all at the Bartons’. For the first time since they were married, Peter and Tony didn’t spend December 16th carefully unwrapping and placing the restored, no-longer-shattered ornaments on the tree. They were once the purchases of Maria Stark from various glamorous department stores of yesteryear; Peter’d had them restored before he and Tony were married. On the anniversary of the Starks’ deaths, they always put them up, but this year, of course, Tony was in a coma. And, because Tony didn’t wake up, they didn’t do it on the 17th, or the 18th, or any of the other days either.

Additionally, there’s no public tree-lighting at the Avengers’ compound, and that’s a damned shame, because that’s been going on since as far back as Peter can really remember. The tradition pre-dates the compound even; they’d done it in Central Park for the Christmas after The Battle of New York.

It had even happened the year Peter was…away. The Christmas after Thanos, that is.

Peter makes sure The September Foundation has directly sent out all the gifts for the families who are down on their luck, and then he goes back to bed.

Tony’s legacy will be intact when he wakes up, Peter has vowed. Peter’s sanity? Not so much.

\---

Loki explains.

The deal is: it’s a life for a life.

They have to save someone in the Mind Realm, to save someone out in the real world. And by save, Loki explains, they have to save the core being of who they are, not just their life. (S.O.S. = save our  _souls_.)

In other words, Loki can’t push someone off a skyscraper and have Tony, in his newly mind-built Iron Man armor, catch them before they hit the pavement. Doesn’t work like that.

They need to do it three times, too; one for Tony, one for Loki, and one for Wanda, because Loki’s lying comatose under Tony’s desk in his abandoned study (under a glamor) and Vision has taken custody of Wanda’s limp body.

They’re all in this fucked up fever dream together.

The first person they go and get is Wanda, because playtime is over. Time to ring the bell.

“It’s time to go,  _Sabrina_. We got a mission,” Tony intones. Wanda is non-plussed. Intensely so.

“I’m spending time with my brother! Goddamnit, it’s Christmas!”

But Pietro is, surprisingly, the voice of reason. “It’s time, my beautiful sister. You’ve been gone from this world for over a decade… this has been more than I could hope for.”

Tony wonders if this  _doppelganger_  of the once-feisty Pietro Maximoff is being so agreeable because Tony has conveniently dreamed him this way, but then again. Maybe time does heal all wounds, and age does mellow our fractiousness.

The truth is, if he’s in control here, he just doesn’t care. He feels for Wanda, always has, but nobody else gets to hang out with _their_ dead loved ones. He’s not a monster; it’s just. Well. Wanda’s Pietro is between Tony and his way home to his Peter. That’s all there really is to it.

Wanda must know this isn’t real, must know that this is only a shade of her brother, because she gives Pietro a hug, steels herself quickly, swipes at her tears, and comes with them. She only looks back once.

Maybe twice.

They warp to Tennessee and strike a quick bargain to save Harley Keener and convince him to check into a very expensive, very… aggressive… rehab center; it’s the same one that got Tony clean (of drugs, anyway) in one go, which had been no small feat. Back in 2001, he’d been very lucky to not get more jail time for breaking his probation. This place had helped him hang on to sobriety; just about the only thing he blamed them for was giving him that day-pass for one month sober. Not that they could have known he’d be meeting someone in the financial sector to see about SI acquiring a manufacturer of some component or other.

Honestly, he lived through September 11th in NYC. Tony figures a little light angst over giving May Parker breast cancer shouldn’t trip him up as bad as he’s letting it.

Besides, Peter needs him. Time to get this done with.

Harley tries to strike a bargain, says that if he’s going to a gender-segregated rehab facility for up to a year then he needs a little boob action before he goes. Wanda… is less than pleased.

So, Loki transforms into a hot chick, as is well within his powers to do, and takes Harley around the corner while Tony’s hands tremor in paternal horror.

Honestly, he kind of likes Loki for his willingness to take one on the chin for the team. (Hopefully, there’s no reason for that phrase to be taken literally, he thinks.)

However, squicky turn of events aside, Tony is still able to draw on all of his mojo to pay for the rehab, finally getting the hang of this lucid-coma-dream stuff. He puts his hand in his pocket and because he expects to find his checkbook there, it  _is_ there. By that logic, the check shouldn’t bounce, because Tony is equally certain that his loaded account also exists, somewhere, somehow, because he’s Tony fucking Stark. (One more time for the people in the back.)

Apparently, confidence really is the key to life.

\---

Peter rolls over and Loki is in his and Tony’s bed.

“Good morning, little  _ergi_ ; I trust you slept well?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you just said, but when Tony wakes up he’s gonna punch your lights out. Get out or I’m calling Dr. Banner and his ‘friend’ to come over.”

\---

Tony and Wanda regroup.

“Okay, well,  _he’s_  taken care of, so now we just gotta get you to rile up Happy and make him realize he deserves better in life. His job is his core of his being, so. I dunno, I was kind of counting on you peacing out beforehand and then just letting Loki piss Happy off.”

“You do not think I’m annoying enough?” Wanda asks as they approach the Statue of Liberty.

Tony side-eyes her. “Did I  _say_ that? I don’t think I did.”

Wanda sidles up to Happy and does some witchy-shit, eyes glinting red. She smirks at Tony as she steps back.

“Oh, Hell no,” Happy spits and stalks away from his post, tossing his vest aside.

Tony watches him go, warmed through with good cheer for his friend, and turns back to congratulate Wanda on a very  _speedy_  success, but.

She’s already gone.

\---

Vision phases into the bedroom and Peter groans.

“What do you want, Viz? We talked about this after… last time.”

“Happy Christmas, is all. I’m grateful that my most precious treasure was returned to me; I hope yours is returned to you soon, as well.”

And with that he drops a gift bag on the mattress next to Peter before phasing out. Loki is long gone.

It’s a pair of socks with spiders and candies embroidered on, for Peter. There’s a matching tie for Tony.

Peter goes back to sleep.

\---

Tony is all set to go get Steve and get the fuck out of here when it hits him.

_They have to save someone in the Mind Realm, to save someone out in the real world._

Someone in the real world. Someone like May Parker-Potts.

He starts to put a plan together.


	5. Matrix

The doctors are very candid with Peter about the timeline of Tony waking up from his coma. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he wishes they weren’t.

He chooses to believe that it’s only a matter of time, though. The highly-trained physicians and researchers at the Avengers’ medical compound _did_ say that Tony appeared to be having shorter and shorter dreams, which was supposedly indicative of more rapid brain activity.

The doctor described it as Tony’s consciousness being like a thing floating and fluttering in a pool. Just because the ripples made by its swimming deep in the pool can’t be seen at the surface, that doesn’t mean that it has stopped swimming altogether. And, as Tony ventured nearer to the surface, nearer to consciousness, those ripples would become more and more visible.

Peter listens attentively to this, but doesn’t truly _hear_ a word. All he’s thinking about is his husband and, well, going in after him.

Tony’s already missed Christmas and New Year’s, and now it’s the first of February and he doesn’t quite know how to stop pretending that this is temporary. Peter will have to start learning how to do things in new ways, ways without Tony, and start participating in the world again. It just feels _wrong_ . It feels wrong for there to _be_ a world that doesn’t include Tony Stark.

He never did decorate that tree.

So, Peter waits and he tries very hard not to think about doing things like filing their taxes or planning Maria and Morgan’s birthday bash, without Tony.

He hopes that whatever Tony dreams about, it’s pleasant. (Peter hopes Tony dreams of him, too, maybe a little selfishly, but also just so he won’t have to be all alone in there.)

\---

It takes Tony a couple of weeks to figure out how to warp again. It was easier when he had Loki and Wanda to focus on. He would just engage ‘the Matrix’ or whatever you want to call it, and think ‘move _those_ people to _this place_ I’m thinking of, oh, and take me with’.

But, now, he’s alone and every time he tries to ‘warp’ his brain just does what it’s been doing for almost sixty years and moves one of his feet in front of the other. He thinks ‘ _go_ ’ but his brain says ‘walk’. It’s beyond frustrating.

He needs to get to Steve, and trade saving Steve for a cure for May. That’s the plan. And, hopefully, if Steve tried to pull that ‘we don’t trade lives’ bullshit, Tony could just use his mind-jutsu on him and make him a bit more agreeable. Peter made him watch the first season of _Naruto_ , okay? He knows how this goes.

Tony is finally able to warp, in fits and starts, to the edge of the continental shelf where Steve’s sunken safe of misery is located. It’s a good thing he was able to think his way around the pressure problems with his Mark LXXIX armor. Seventy-ninth time’s the charm, right?

He’d done the little science experiment with the difference in air pressure and the crumpling soda can, oh, probably a dozen times, just to hear Morgan and Maria giggle at the way the metal folded like paper without anything touching it.

He really didn’t want to be the soda can, right now.

Tony, fortunately, is able to use his hydraulic hooks to haul the safe arduously back up to the surface. He’s grateful this is his dream, and not real life… it’s frankly scary to think about all the ways in which this might go wrong or be outright impossible if this was real life.

When they reach the shore, Tony cracks the safe with the confidence only a lucid dreamer could muster and lets Steve’s ridiculous, once-muscled self pour from the safe’s confines like a heap of ragged bones. The blond has looked better, that’s for sure.

Tony collapses beside the unconscious super-soldier and waits.

\---

After Christmas, when Peter had had impromptu visits from both Loki and Vision, well. He’d talked with Viz about whatever was effecting Tony and ended up with more questions than answers from the experience. Apparently, with Wanda returned to consciousness, the Mind Stone was no longer channeling her powers onto Tony at all. There’s no reason for him to still be asleep, and yet.

Vision’s theory was that, like it had done in the past, the Mind Stone had somewhat altered Tony’s thought patterns to make them more organized and matrix-like, so that a good approximation of reality could be mapped onto them easily. This same phenomenon had been what made Wanda so ruthless and mercenary and ready to join HYDRA when she had been little more than a scared child.

It’s also what had made Loki’s plans for world domination, all those years ago, so… unsubtle. He’d been a master of trickery, flattery, and subterfuge for an age, but the machine-like pragmatism of the Mind Stone had driven him along the shortest possible distance, without regard for subtlety. Infinity Stones, apparently, have a way of tripping headlong into their own pitfalls that way. They weren’t truly without weakness unless they were all together, you see.

Peter remembers that, from his own... journey. He hopes that little fact will protect Tony on his, too.

Vision says Tony will wake up when he wants to. (Peter wonders why he hasn't wanted to, yet.)

\---

Steve comes to in a wave of gushing salt water, straight from his flooded lungs, and Tony startles. “Feeling better, Princess Buttercup?”

The captain scrambles away from Tony to finish hacking and coughing, body language defensive. Once he’s found a semblance of his voice, he croaks, “Who are you?”

And Tony, luckily, had thought about this extensively while trying to figure out how to warp to the middle of the ocean. “I’m Howard Stark’s son.”

It’s Steve’s turn to startle, at that. “Howard never had children.”

“Maybe not in your timeline, but we’re through the looking glass, Alice. I’m the real deal. Where I come from, you’re all he talked about, of course, but that’s neither here nor there.”

And just like Tony expected he would, Steve latches on to that bit of ego-boost about Howard talking about him, and it starts to smooth things over. “You’re from a different timeline?”

“What, you can see a dude with a melted-off face and a funky, mystical, giant-ice-cube-looking gem-thing, but time travel is a bridge too far?”

Steve scrutinizes him. “You know an awful lot for someone who is just Howard’s son.”

Tony chooses to gloss over that by saying the one word that will speed up this whole process. “I know about Bucky, too. I also know how to get him back.”

(That just about takes care of that.)

\---

Peter watches the light on Tony’s desk phone blink. Former Secretary Ross has been on hold for quite a while. He doesn’t pick it up.

This whole mess isn’t any of Ross’s _business_ , he thinks. At first, around Christmas, when the letters from fans and supporters had started pouring in, Peter had been grateful. It had given him an outlet for his pent-up love for Tony, which (in the face of such a grave illness) had almost been more than he could have safely contained. He’d felt positively _radioactive_ with it. It had been something to light him up, keep him warm.

Now it feels a lot more weaponizable. The outpourings of support have taken on more of an impatient tone. Ross keeps calling. People keep ‘checking in’, presumably on Peter, but they always end their conversations with, “...and what _do_ Tony’s doctors say?”

And, to think, a few months ago, his biggest problem had been the fear of turning thirty. Now, he’s worried about May, he’s worried about Tony, he’s worried about Pepper and the kids and the _world_. (He’s worried about himself, too.)

If Tony is the world’s greatest defender, then fine, they can _find another one_. But Peter?

He made his choice a long time ago.

\---

Tony is lucky that he’s got a mind like a steel trap (and not one that’s rusted shut, either, like some closed-minded ‘geniuses’ out there). Otherwise, he’d never be able to remember the way Peter had, haunted, recounted the details of his journey through each Infinity Arena. (That’s a lie. As if anyone could forget the tears pouring down Peter Parker’s pale face, once that face had faded back into existence from the dust and ash it had become.)

Peter had told Tony, probably told him more than anybody else, about what he’d witnessed on his trek through the realms of each Infinity Stone. He’d been cursed and chosen in the same breath (that _last_ breath), to be the one who would follow each stone’s guardian, listen to their stories, and intimately learn the particular facets against which the resonant energy of each stone’s chosen element echoed.

Now, with his hands open to the sky as he’s watched carefully by the man who is both forty-something and over a hundred years old, Tony calls on the memory of Peter explaining how each stone felt, how the dreamscapes he’d had as a backdrop to his spirit journey had heaved and yawned and vibrated around him like the scrim at the back of a stage.

It's time to access that Matrix part of his mind again.

Time to get started on his rock collection.


End file.
